Wajam Mashes Social Media and Search Engines For More Effective Results

“A lot of users don’t understand what social search means,” says Martin-Luc Archambault, CEO and cofounder of Wajam. “The first time I asked my dad if he would like to have social search he said, ‘What? I don’t want you to see what I’m searching for.’ That isn’t what it is about.”

Montreal-based Wajam is a social search engine that enables users the heightened ability to find links, photos, videos and more through the help of friends on social media. Allowing users to filter out their searches by different categories such as content, social media and friends, Wajam connects people, enhances the searching experience and saves time discovering areas and topics of similar interests.

The idea for Wajam came to Archambault while working on another startup project with a partner. They were both researching, searching individually—when they brought their findings together, they discovered that the results were mostly similar. The end result was a lot of time wasted, due to lack of communication, one that social searches remedy. Because as their tag line indicates, “Great minds search alike.”

Friends and families are constantly sharing useful information on social media. Because the network is becoming more and more saturated, you will miss some of the content. By incorporating Wajam, you can harness your friend and families’ knowledge and reel them up whenever you need to through the Wajam website, their browser extension and their soon-to-be released mobile app.

“We are not trying to tell users to come to Wajam.com and search on Wajam.com, we are not trying to replace anyone,” said Archambault. “We are going to work with whoever you like.”

Whether it is Google, Biing, Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, Yahoo! or many other search engines, Wajam is built to work seamlessly with the platform searchers are familiar with.

After the launch in the January 2012, Wajam had found what they were looking for: a community benefiting from the social search platform they had created. Earlier this year Wajam was rewarded the golden honour at the 8th Annual 2013 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards in Best New Information Technology Company category, as well as the silver in Innovative Company category and bronze in the Company Growth category.

But the acclaimed team isn’t settling yet, they are anticipating new innovations all the time and Wajam has their eyes set on the future.

“We are trying to match advertisers with social recommendations,” Archambault told Techvibes. “Once we are able to do that we will be able to syndicate social search and social ad API to third party sites. My ultimate goal is that a year from now users won’t have to download Wajam to get recommendations from their friends on Amazon.” Archambault added, “We can help Amazon tailor their search results. Any site that has a search box, we want to be their API. We want to make those search results more personal. That is how we are intending to scale.”

What began as a few hundred downloads a day has grown into tens of thousands. Wajam doesn’t want to preach the effectiveness of social search or even explain what it does. It proves itself best in action. The social search engine is confident that their product will exceed users’ expectations if they log on, try the product and incorporate it into daily searches. The value of Wajam is worth finding.